Work, walk, meditate: Practice, by Rosalind Brown, reviewed

Practice is a short novel set in a ‘narrow room’: one day in the life of an Oxford undergraduate writing an essay on Shakespeare’s sonnets. Annabel is trying to ‘perfect her routine, to get more out of each day’. She goes to bed early and rises at 6 a.m. She makes coffee like it’s a ritual and drinks it from the same small, brown mug. She has a plan. She will work, walk, do yoga, meditate, each at their allotted time. The restriction of the novel – a single day, a single character, discrete passages strung together like a sonnet sequence – lends itself to a delicate portrait of Annabel’s struggles with discipline, focus and attention.

From one angle, she thinks her determination to cloister herself in her work ‘glints like the single-mindedness that one day becomes greatness’. But she admits that from another ‘it looks wrong’. The novel collects glimpses and shifting perspectives. It describes the light as it changes through the day, and captures nebulous states of mind: what it feels like to pay attention, to be distracted, to meditate. Annabel aspires to ‘understand subtle, fragile things’. This might be an apt description of Practice too.

For Annabel, literature is something to be worn against the skin. She collects quotations and ideas that strike her. She metabolises what she reads, so it flows together with her own thoughts. We first hear about her love of Virginia Woolf in a list of real lovers, and Woolf feels present throughout the novel; there’s a shadow of A Room of One’s Own in questions about making space to think. Annabel’s reading is a practice of attentiveness and discipline: ‘The texts… how do they want us to make ourselves available to them?’ Set within an ordinary day in Annabel’s life, these questions amplify: in a world of competing demands, what kind of attention is possible?

Practice has a flavour of Annabel’s self-seriousness about it.